You are a brave creative human.
The Creative Confidant is a whisper of enoughness in a noisy world demanding more.
It’s a book about boosting creative confidence, written and released story-by-story, created in a community space with a leaning towards experimentation.
Join the adventure by subscribing for free. Every new story goes directly to your inbox.
This is dedicated to my parents and to my children; a foundation of self-esteem is the greatest gift I’ve ever received and it’s the greatest gift I have to give.
Writing on Writing
Writing is something I’ve done more and more as my day job and my passion projects have collided. I’ve written for industry magazines (long before I was ready), for university degrees, for new online course developments and for podcast episodes.
The 8 year old who never saw herself as a capable writer (especially next to her more articulate classmates) would be shocked to know that a big part of her grown up job is writing.
The Growth of an Idea
I am so grateful to traverse the tall beanstalk of creative confidence, tendrils reaching into the clouds, initially planted as a tiny seedling in November 2021. During this time, I facilitated conversations in roundtable discussions entitled Gaining Confidence When You Don’t *Feel* Confident at RGD's Design reThinkers Conference 2021 conference.
After the conference was over, I had this lingering feeling to continue exploring the topic. I wrote an article based on my experiences called New Year, New-Found Confidence, which was published by the RGD in January 2022. It contains a series of ideas about changing perspective to find confidence in creative work, co-created by myself and the 21 roundtable participants. The beanstalk was now as tall as my knees.
The article evolved into an invitation to speak at RGD's Creative Directions 2022 conference in February, where participants and I continued the important discussion about creative confidence, reframing the ideas holding us back. The beanstalk was now as tall as my waist.
Around the same time, I had the incredible opportunity to pitch a course idea to the team at Domestika. My creative intuition begged me to continue watering the beanstalk — as tall as ever, now eye-to-eye — to help it grow. I flew to New York to film the course with the Domestika team in June 2022 and in January 2023 and I was beyond grateful to share my first Domestika course with the world: Building Creative Confidence: Unleash Your Potential. With 800 students and counting, the beanstalk now stands taller than me, having grown much larger and faster than I expected.
From here, I’ve had the opportunity to continue speaking, teaching and writing about failure, perfectionism, imposter syndrome and more.
You never know where an idea can lead!
The Creation of a Book, One Story at a Time
It could lead here: to writing a book.
This big undertaking has been in the back of my mind for a while (eeeeek, I’ve got the scaries!), but now feels like the right time and space to bring my creative confidence ideas, stories and invitations to the written page.
As I begin to understand the process of writing a book, it’s often described as a lonely and isolating undertaking. I want a big part of the writing experience to be created in conversation with people around me. I aspire for these stories to be created in a space filled with community and with a leaning towards experimentation, which is why releasing every piece of it along the way feels like the right fit.
My goal is to produce and release a portion of the book — bit-by-bit — each week. This is what you’ll receive when you subscribe for free to The Creative Confidant.
I hope you’ll join along. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback along the way. What’s resonating? What’s most impactful? What gaps am I missing in logic or flow? I’m all ears in this process.
Thank you for accompanying me on the beanstalk adventure; eyes to the skies, up into the clouds of creativity.
Diana
